Sunflowers and okra

Our big successes, this time of year!

George gets lost in the sunflowers and okra plants

Paddling Yonah Lake

Taylor and I went paddling this morning on Yonah Lake, an impoundment of the Tugaloo River, which forms part of the Georgia-South Carolina border, just downstream of Lake Tugalo. (The river name ends with 2 o's; all other names (lake, park, village, etc.) end with one 'o'.)

Taylor paddles south from Tugalo Park boat launch at head of Yonah Lake

No picture of it, but as we paddled south, we came upon a massive bald eagle in a lakeside tree on the South Carolina shore, startled it, and watched as it circled around us, no more than 100' away. Very, very impressive!

Tugalo Dam, at the head of Yonah Lake.

View of Tugalo Lake, from the road to Yonah Lake. Tugalo Park is a Georgia Power
campground and boat launch, located at the foot of Tugalo Dam,
and at the head of Yonah Lake.

From the road to Yonah Lake, you can see what is probably the biggest house in Rabun County, overlooking Lake Tugalo.

Near top-center is an enormous house on a hilltop overlooking Lake Tugalo.
Photo below shows a Google Earth detail of that house.

The shadows reveal the Disneyland-like towers of this house.

Yonah Lake is the most-downstream of Georgia Power's lakes on the Tallulah watershed. From the top, they are Burton, Seed, Rabun, Tallulah Falls, Tugalo and Yonah. Burton's lake level is 1866' above sea level; Yonah's is 744', and below its dam, 670'; a total drop of 1196', most of it harnessed by hydropower turbines. Yonah has some houses around its shore, but relatively few compared to Burton. Most of the houses on the Georgia side have road access; most of the South Carolina houses are boat-access only.

Taylor's wind sock

Looking for a better mounting, but here it is!

Kitchen improvements

Two things:

1. We've built a new cabinet into the largely-unused space over the refrigerator. This will be useful for storing large, not-often used things like canning equipment, crock-pot, etc. We used tongue-and-groove boards, glued together into panels, for the cabinet side and doors.

New cabinet over refrigerator

2. We've modified the base cabinets to the left and right of the sink cabinet, so that now each contains two full-width, full-depth drawers (about 24" x 24"), mounted on full-extension drawer slides. Huge improvement, compared to getting down on hands and knees to find stuff in the back of the old cabinets! We built the drawer fronts of knotty-pine, lightly-stained and varnished.

New drawers make these cabinets more usable

To get to the back, lower section of this cabinet, before drawers,
you had to get down on the floor and do the gator crawl. Much easier now!

Bony fish

Now hanging from the Blue Fish sign, in front

Thanks, Ruthlyn!

AC and company

Johnny, Lynn, Ann Cox, Jake, Daniel and Laura

Moon set, Labor Day weekend

Moon set, pre-dawn, over Timpson Cove

Detail: waning gibbous, 96% illuminated

All quiet on the western front

How bout them dawgs!

Propaganda starts early for Charlie